DAY KEENE – My Flesh Is Sweet. Lion #68, paperback original, September 1951. MacFadden-Bartell, paperback, 1969. Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2005, in a two-for-one combo with Framed in Guilt, another Day Keene novel.  Armchair Fiction, softcover, 2020.

   Mystery novels for which the setting involves either pulp writers or the pulp magazine industry are few and far between, and those which do ought to be well noted and documented, even if they’re not very good. As it so happens, this is one, and it’s actually a rather good one, indeed – not surprisingly, as it’s by one of the better paperback writers of the day, Day Keene.

   It begins in Mexico City, as pulp fiction writer Ad Connors witnesses an automobile accident involving a Mexican general and a beautiful American tourist, female. Who’s at fault? The general, of course, but who in Mexico would believe her, her word against his? Connors decides to intervene, which as you know if you’ve ever read a novel by Day Keene before, is rather a hasty (and regrettable) decision on his part.

   Connors has been in Mexico trying to write the great American novel. It hasn’t worked out. All he has to his name is a few pesos and his typewriter, and the latter is stolen as he manages to get Miss Elena Hayes out of the trouble she’s in. But not completely. Later that evening Connors has to intervene again, this time in Elena’s hotel room and in shall we say, compromising terms and with the general shot and presumably dead.

   Whether he is or not, Mexico City is no place to be found at a time such as this. Flight is their only choice. And as they head for a safe haven, Ad learns more about Elena and why she’s in Mexico. A lawyer there should be able to vouch for her birth, that her parents were married. Why is this important? She is about to be married back in the States, and to a very wealthy man.

   It perhaps need not be said that she does not love this man.

   The book thus falls into two parts. I found the first, as the two fugitives manage to stay just a few days ahead of the law, only to become involved in another murder, to be the more interesting. The second half, back in the USA, is another murder mystery to be solved, one involving the disappearance of Elena’s father when she was young back in the far distant past, and yet another murder.

   This is, of course, the key to the tale Keene is keen to tell, but what happens in the first half of the book is considerably more vivid and alive, or so it read to me. The cover of the Lion edition makes the story seem to be lurid and just a little sleazy, and maybe it was, back in 1951. Today, though, it’s quite tame in that regard, if not out-and-out tepid. The overall murder mystery is well done, though, and Keene makes the page fly by.

   Getting back to the pulp writing business, though, I should like to point out that to finance his and Elena’s escape from Mexico, Connors has to hammer out two stories in a week or so and get them sold. Not only that, but the two stories are closely related to the two halves of My Flesh Is Sweet itself, with only a few modifications. Which are important, too, and neatly so.